VAR - Victories Away Rising

TipTap commented on my recent VAR - Veritable Away Results post:

You say that VAR has removed some of the Home advantage - does this apply to league football as well? is there evidence for this? Although given it started 2017ish, then we had Covid and empty stadiums, may not be enough comparable data yet?

What data we have is pretty clear on the impact of VAR and of reduced attendances due to COVID. Lane Clark & Peacock (LCP), a firm of financial consultants based in the City of London, produced a report in December 2020 with the title "COVID-19 and VAR decimate 'home advantage' in football leagues across Europe".

LCP’s Football Analytics team who have developed TransferLab, an online football data scouting tool, have analysed results of football games across the big five European Leagues (the English Premier League, French Ligue 1, Germany’s Bundesliga, Italy’s Serie A and Spain’s La Liga), looking back over the past 6 seasons for comparative data.

The data shows that, while the introduction of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) between 2017 and 2019 (depending on the league) reduced home advantage across Europe by around 14%, the remaining home advantage largely disappeared after there were no fans in the stadium following the pandemic.

For the first time in history, the top flight in English football saw more Away wins than home in 2020-21, and other top flight leagues to have their lowest ever home win percentage last season were France, Scotland, Germany, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands. Portugal's lowest was in 2019-20, with 2020-21 not far behind. The EPL this season currently is the second worst ever for Home sides winning just 41.3% of games. 

Declining Home Advantage was already a trend I have written about before. In 123 seasons of top flight football in England, only nine times have Away wins exceeded 30%. The table below shows how many of those are recent with 1946-47 an outlier likely due to being the first season after the disruption of the Second World War:

VAR was introduced in the EPL for 2019-20, a season impacted by COVID in March of course, so there's an overlap for two seasons with the pandemic and restricted attendances, but the data so far seems to back up the logical rationale that Home advantage is reduced by goal-line technology and VAR. I'm sure there will be more on this in published studies as time goes on, but as investors we don't have the luxury of waiting for mathematical proof, since paradoxically by then the edge will no longer be there. 

If you had backed the Away in all EPL matches since the introduction of VAR, your ROI would be 9.4% (from 1048 matches) compared with -8.8% for the previous 19 seasons.